On Lawfare, David Goie explores why he thinks the Afghanistan Papers, a recent release of an internal investigation of the handling of the ongoing Afghanistan War, both civil and military, and incompetence involved since the start, isn’t much like the fabled Pentagon Papers. He has three such reasons:
First, there is little at stake for the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population with respect to the ongoing Afghan war. The war in Afghanistan is dragging on into its 19th year, but this would not be obvious from the media coverage, congressional hearings, Pentagon briefings or public activism. As one journalist put it, “From a political point of view, this war is about as important as storms on Saturn.” In contrast to the white-hot issue of the Vietnam War, especially on college campuses where widespread anti-war marches and protests were the norm, most Americans seem to have lost interest in what happens in Afghanistan.
I would also attribute our deficit of attention on our shortened attention spans, and the failure of major media, which has become underfunded due to the competition from free, if inferior, websites, to cover the war in the detail necessary to elicit outrage.
And the Republicans have worked hard to keep this war from having a negative impact, primarily by not raising taxes to cover it. Remember that? I remember that decision quite well, and I remain appalled, because that cost goes right to the Federal deficit, a number as of June of last year, according to the balance, of $975 billion, or, given a rough population estimate of 330,000,000 for the United States, a per capita cost of nearly $30,000.
Suppose that every tax filing had a little box that said, You owe $1500 to cover our costs of the War in Afghanistan … Do you think we’d still forget?
No. Those who started the war didn’t want to take a chance that someday it’d be hung around their necks, so they endeavoured not to let it seep into the public consciousness like the Vietnam War did. The result? THE LONGEST WAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY. And yet … it’s not hard to see it continuing. There are enough facets which seem to warrant our interference that even pacifists must weep on consideration of vacating Kabul.
Second, the Afghanistan Papers did not reveal anything that those who have been paying any attention didn’t already know in general terms; namely, that a theory of victory beyond ensuring al-Qaeda would never again be openly hosted by the Taliban was unrealistic. No serious independent analysts or scholars felt that a theory of victory could include the transformative power of nation-building, especially on a timeline and within a budget that the American public would tolerate. Surely the newly declassified details and candid firsthand perspectives are an important contribution to better analyses of U.S. conduct in the war, but since at least 2008 the SIGAR has issued many disturbing readily-available unclassified reports that catalogued the waste and fraud in the ill-conceived effort to build Afghanistan and buy some goodwill in the process. One need not read all of the SIGAR reports or other scholarship to plainly see that the Afghanistan mission was not going as military and civilian leaders were saying it was. As Jason Lyall noted in the Washington Post, “[N]one of these revelations are surprising. … In short, if you’re surprised by the Afghanistan Papers, you haven’t been paying attention.”
However, Goie himself isn’t paying attention – because this is the logical next step, beginning from his first observation. The war is not front and center, we’re not paying for it with immense casualties, well, hell, I don’t think about it more than once a month. It’s flown under the radar, and so if Goie and his colleague Lyall are surprised that everyone else is surprised – well, they’ve not been paying attention to how the war has been treated.
A third crucial difference setting up disappointment for the Afghanistan Papers is their rather mundane origin story as compared to the Pentagon Papers. There is no central figure or trusted insider, such as Daniel Ellsberg, who ultimately leaked the documents at personal risk as a cause célèbre—in his case inviting President Nixon’s ire and, more to the point, criminal charges.
To be sure. Humans function on stories, not on dry sets of facts, at least outside of the scientific community, and even there the facts are the seeds for stories.
But let me suggest that the American context is drastically different between 1971 and today. The Pentagon Papers erased the last of the sheen from the American military, burnished in World War II, but stained by the following two wars. While many Americans might have been aware that corruption was happening, for the majority of Americans the military had saved us from the Axis Powers, and service was a deeply honorable occupation. Even with My Lai and other abominations in the rear view mirror, Americans wanted to believe. The Pentagon Papers were another nail in that coffin.
Today? Particularly among the younger generations, facing a future which includes both a badly damaged environment, and corporate and government groups that seem bent on destroying more of it in pursuit of profit, they seem to have gained a sense of realism which precludes any surprise at corruption and failure to stand up and proclaim something is wrong. And the older generations still remember Vietnam.
The result is a tired yawn and shaking of heads. Will we learn from the mistakes documented in the Afghanistan Papers? It’s hard to say. It requires the ability to admit we made mistakes, many of them, and while the military can be good at that, some of these mistakes were made by a civilian leadership in continual flux, and sometimes of a third-rate nature. That’s not an optimal situation.
I’m not optimistic.
